Modern medicine provides us with a variety of methods for diagnosis and analysis. However, many procedures are rarely used because they are expensive or time-consuming to carry out. This problem does not exist with the new technology of a research team at the Charité.
Mass spectrometry offers insight into disease progression
Proteins are found in every cell in the human body and perform vital tasks. When external influences such as pathogens or drugs get into the body, this triggers various reactions in the proteins. This creates a very specific pattern, the proteome, which can be read in tissue or blood samples. With the help of this proteome, researchers can, for example, better understand diseases or make individual statements about the course of diseases. In order to read out the protein pattern, mass spectrometry is used, which, however, is still very costly and time-consuming. A research team from Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin now claims to have solved this problem.
Analysis in minutes thanks to machine learning
„Scanning SWATH“ is the name of the technology developed by the Charité and Francis Crick Institute, which works much faster and cheaper than conventional methods: it delivers the result in just a few minutes, which means that several hundred samples can be measured per day. “In order to accelerate the technology, we changed the electric fields in the mass spectrometer,” explains Prof. Dr. Markus Ralser, Director of the Institute for Biochemistry at the Charité. This creates very complex data that humans can no longer analyze. The researchers therefore used so-called neural networks, a type of machine learning algorithm, to filter out and examine the biological information. “This allows us to determine thousands of proteins in parallel and reduces the measurement time many times over. Fortunately, the method is also more precise, ”says Prof. Ralser.
Protein pattern helps with Covid-19 assessment
The SWATH method could be used, for example, in SARS-CoV-2 therapy. Using the proteome analysis, biological characteristics (biomarkers) could be identified that provide information about the course of the disease. With blood plasma analyzes from 30 Covid-19 patients and 15 healthy people, the researchers found a total of 54 proteins, the concentration of which was either increased or decreased depending on the severity of the disease. In the future, doctors could use the new technology to determine the individual risk of sick people. “With our new method, we discovered protein fingerprints in blood samples in a very short time, which we can now use to classify Covid-19 sufferers according to the severity of their disease,” says Dr. Christoph Messner, one of the study authors and scientist at the Institute for Biochemistry at the Charité and at the Francis Crick Institute. “Such an objective assessment can be very valuable, as the patients sometimes overestimate their state of health.”
Technology with potential
Whether for the identification of biomarkers, basic research or the search for drugs – the possible areas of application are numerous. In addition, Prof. Ralser sees the mass spectrometric method as an addition to the routine examination: “Determining the proteome now costs less than a complete blood count. By determining many thousands of proteins at the same time, a proteome analysis also provides much more information. I therefore see great potential in widespread use, for example for the early detection of diseases. In our studies we will therefore continue to work towards such a use of proteome technology. “
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